Welcome to the sixth lesson of our free course “WildCloud – How to Create a Multitenant eCommerce Platform”.
What is the storefront app?
According to the Wildcloud documentation, a storefront is “an application that uses the API feature provided by wildcloud to provision and manage tenants on the wildcloud platform. You can connect more than one Storefront to an Application, which allows you to have multiple specialized stores or set up a local development environment.”
In simple terms, the storefront is the marketing site of your platform. It’s your homepage where you list the features of your platform, display your pricing, have a contact form, and people buy a subscription to create their stores.
Open the storefront site
The first thing we need to do is to open the storefront site to start setting it up.
Just follow these steps:
1- Log in to your Wildcloud account
2- Open your storefront application by clicking on Go To App.
3- Go to the Tenants section and open the storefront site.
You will see that the storefront app automatically creates a Storefront site.
Click on the site’s name to open the details.
4- Click on Login as [your username] to open the wp-admin dashboard of the storefront site.
This will open the wp-admin dashboard of the storefront site.
Now you can start configuring your site as you see fit.
You can design it as you like using any page builder that you want. You can create your sales pages, pricing pages, contact page, about us page, etc.
Here, we will only show you the process to configure the payment system, so people buy a subscription and their stores are automatically created.
Change the site title
The first thing we will do is change the site title because Wildcloud adds a generic name by default.
Go to Settings > General and change the site title in the Site Title field.
You can also remove the Tagline.
Once you’re done, save the changes.
Select the customer user role
When customers create a new site on our platform, they will receive a user role that will give them capabilities to manage aspects of the site.
In lesson 4, we selected that users with the Shop Manager role would be able to access the front-end dashboard.
This means that those users will not be able to access the normal wp-admin dashboard of their own sites/tenants, but will be redirected to the global front-end dashboard, where they will be able to manage their sites.
Therefore, it is most appropriate to select the same user role as the customer user role.
You can do this with the WaaS Host plugin, which is already installed and active on your storefront site by default.
Go to WPCS.io > Settings in wp-admin.
Now add the user role in the Customer user role field.
Once done, save the changes.
Set up the subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin
Wildcloud allows you to sell memberships using WooCommerce and Subscriptions for WooCommerce. As you will notice, these plugins are already installed on both the storefront application and the storefront site.
You need to set up the Subscriptions for WooCommerce plugin.
Go to WP Swings > Subscriptions for WooCommerce.
Once there, complete the steps to start selling subscriptions.
Note: You can enable the PayPal Standard gateway on the Subscriptions for WooCommerce general settings.
Set up payment gateways
To configure the payment methods available for your customers to purchase and pay for their subscriptions/memberships, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Payments.
Once there, you can start configuring your payment gateways.
For this example, we will use the PayPal Standard gateway with the PayPal Sandbox setting enabled.
You can do the same if you want to test the platform, or set up your real payment gateway for WooCommerce.
Create a subscription product for your platform
After setting up the payment gateways, you’ll be ready to start creating a subscription product, which is like the membership plan that you will sell to your clients in order for them to be able to create an online store on your platform.
Just follow these steps:
1- Go to Products > Add New.
2- Add the product title, descriptions, featured image, etc.
3- Tick the Subscription and WPCS Product checkboxes.
Enter the regular price.
4- Move to the WPCS tab in Product data, and select these values:
- Role – This is the tenant role we created in the version of our WaaS application. As you can see, the storefront site automatically detects the roles added to the production version of the WaaS application connected to it. If you don’t see any role here, you can click on Refresh Roles.
- Tenant snapshot groupname: Here you can select the group name to which you added the tenant snapshot when you created it in the previous lesson of this course.
5- Move to the Subscriptions settings tab and select these settings:
- Subscription Per Interval
- Subscription Expiry Interval
- Initial Signup fee
- Free trial interval
6- Once you’re done selecting everything you need, you can Publish/Update the product.
And with this, your ecommerce platform should be working fine. Any visitor that opens this product will be able to purchase it, they will be asked to enter their site information in the checkout form, and their store will be created automatically after their purchase.
Remember that this is a regular WooCommerce store, you can configure WooCommerce as needed.
In the next lesson, we will test the platform.